The frequencies of a vibrating spider web have been made into music

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Spiders are mostly blind, but their webs are sensitive to disturbances, which they detect with their legs. Now, scientists have created an audio-visual virtual reality take on this that converts a web’s vibrations to sounds we can hear, giving us an idea of what it might feel like to be a spider.

“The spider web can be viewed as an extension of the body of the spider, in that it lives within it, but also uses it as a sensor,” says Markus Buehler at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who presented the work at a virtual meeting of the American Chemical Society. “When you go into the virtual reality world and you dive inside the web, being able to hear what’s going on allows you to understand what you see.”

Because of differences in the length and tension of each strand of a spider’s web, they emit a different frequency when disturbed and can even be used to send out signals or communicate with other spiders when the web’s owner taps on the strands.